Pew(38)

You see, many years ago, when Johnny was just a little boy, I took him up to the zoo because he’d been asking after it for months—then, finally, I got it all together—gas in the car, took a whole Saturday off work to drive up there. But once we were there, he went right up to the lion cage and looks in there for a long while, just thinking, then he sat down on the ground and cried a whole hour, everyone looking at him, complaining. A guard told me we had to move along, that Johnny was upsetting everyone who was here to see the lion, but he wouldn’t move. Maybe another parent would have gotten physical with him, but that’s not the way I did things—maybe I would have if I could, but I never had the nerve. The lion was pacing at the back of the cage, not looking at anyone. I tried to get Johnny to come along, to go on to the next animal, but he wouldn’t. It just about took forever to get out of there and get him in the car to go home, and it wasn’t until the end of the summer that he told me what had made him so upset. He said he couldn’t see the difference between himself and the lion. And I said, Johnny—he was maybe eleven or twelve at the time—I said, Johnny you’re a little boy who goes to school and plays sports and sings in the choir and a lion is a lion. He was a very bright boy—ahead in all his classes, reading without me even asking him to, so I thought he’d understand, but he said—and I’ll always remember him saying this, he said—Ma, they’ve got eyes like anyone else. So I told him what I know, which is that a lion’s eyes are much bigger than a little boy’s eyes, that they’re not like his eyes at all, but he wasn’t having it. He started listing off all the other animals at the zoo—ones he hadn’t even seen—and saying how they weren’t any different from him either and he was just so sure about it. It was causing him pain, this idea, it was clearly upsetting him, all those animals locked up, but I didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t be reasoned with. Even as a little boy. He had his ideas and he held them.
As she spoke, I could feel her both wanting and not wanting to look into my eyes—my eyes like anyone else’s. I sat there within or behind myself, and listened to her speak.
After a little while I thought he’d forgotten about how much the zoo had upset him, and he started reading his Bible a bit more and he just loved Dr. Corbin, wanted to get to Sunday school early all the time … and it did make me glad to see him so moved by it all, but also—and I don’t know how to say it—he seemed a little … upset. He took it all so seriously. Everything seemed to hurt him. All of it, the whole world. Then he wouldn’t eat meat, not even fish or anything, then it was eggs and dairy—wouldn’t eat those either—and for a while he was even worried about the farmers. Well, there was hardly anything he would eat. He wanted to know who had grown and picked everything I tried to give him—and he got so thin. Fourteen, fifteen years old and smaller than a girl—I didn’t know what to do. I took him to doctors, a psychologist all the way up in the city—nothing would work. He was so frail but the hospital wouldn’t take him because I didn’t have the right insurance—imagine not helping a sick child because of some damn paperwork—and the other doctors just said he was being stubborn, that he’d grow out of it soon. Then Dr. Corbin was no help and anyway he’s not even a medical doctor … Sure, people call him doctor but he’s no doctor—probably wouldn’t know how to operate a Band-Aid. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, and my brother said I was overreacting, said that me caring so much would just make it worse. But I couldn’t help it—I could see the bones in his face when I looked at him—like looking at his skeleton. Whose fault would it be if not mine? My son.
She sat there quietly, pressed her hands flat on the table, then slowly pulled them into her lap.
Well, he did get better, eventually, started eating a little more, though he still wouldn’t have meat and if I cooked any of it at home, he would try to have a conversation with it. One time he read a bunch of poems to a package of ground beef on the kitchen counter. Another time he told me he could hear the voices of the dead, people and animals, and they all spoke the same language. Well, I never did know what to say to that. Hearing voices of the dead … it didn’t even seem particularly Christian.
I felt sure then that I would understand Mrs. Columbus’s son and he would understand me and the only tragedy was that he was not here and would never be here again and I knew this was true from the way that sorrow had calcified on Mrs. Columbus. Some things a person cannot help but know.
But Johnny was always serious about his church, and even though I think it was Dr. Corbin who’d gotten Johnny onto being a vegetarian, he was no help with the mess it created for me. He still insists that Johnny chose that path on his own accord, that he never told him what to do. A few years went by, and it seemed Johnny had calmed down a little, so I started asking him about that time—the zoo, the starving, the worrying, speaking to meat. I asked him if he’d maybe been depressed or something, and he told me it was all something he’d received from Scripture. And he said, Ma, I don’t deserve anything, maybe others do, but I don’t, so I said, Johnny, I think you deserve things, but he said, No. Then he said all kinds of things I didn’t understand and at the end of it he said he didn’t think that Christians were special, that even the Bible had parts that drew lines between people, and now even the church didn’t mean anything to him, and he’d only kept going to appease me.